Well, Frum isn’t getting in line, so I thought I would try to give him the talk I gave my daughter when she was having trouble getting along with her playground friends.

Dear Dave,

Look, you are special. Nobody else is Davey Frum. You have talents that no other person in this world possesses. But I have to tell you what the right thing to do is.

There is a tendency of all people, it is in fact human nature, to try to impress other people to feel loved. That feeling is pursued continually by some people, exactly because it is fleeting. True friendship is given by people who are interested in your thought. If you continually say things or do things to seem agreeable to certain people, you will absolutely seem disagreeable to others. For instance, if you compromise your beliefs to get noticed by the popular people, the people who you have stood with in the past will be offended, and since the people of your past are not interested in what is popular, but rather, your thought, you have no chance of true friendship.

My daughter, when she was 9, came to me when she was having a hard time getting along with the other girls on the playground. She was upset because one of the girls didn’t like one of my daughter’s friends and wouldn’t play with my kid unless the other was out of the picture. Not only that, but when playing as a group, one of the girls was very bossy and only wanted to play the game she wanted to play and would not listen to other suggestions. My daughter wondered if she should just go along with the bossy, popular girl because everybody else was, and forget that it was a mean thing to do to her ostracized friend.

I told her, look, you need to understand that you are special, and interesting and beautiful. If you go off and play by yourself, you will find true friendship, because there will be plenty of people that see in you what I see in you, and you will have the right kind of friends. The ones that truly love you and will not abandon you.

Dave, go find some friends. You are not a conservative, so stop trying to say that you are. Rush and Mark have real friends.

Evidently pro-life readers have not honored David Frum’s request not to e-mail him about his latest declaration that he is not pro-life. He responds today by raising two related points about a ban on abortion: 1) Such a ban would tear the country apart and 2) Pro-lifers have a duty to explain what would be done to women who procure an abortion under the ban they seek. Other pro-lifers would no doubt give different answers, but here are mine — in reverse order.

Most pro-lifers have tended to treat the woman seeking an abortion as a secondary victim of the procedure. This answer is intellectually unsatisfying, sentimental, and (arguably) disrespectful of women’s moral agency. I do not believe that criminal penalties against the women can be rejected in principle. But they are not required in principle either. The purpose of a ban on abortion is to provide unborn children with the same legal protection against homicide that other human beings enjoy. If effective equal protection could be provided by removing the medical licenses of doctors who commit abortions and imposing steep fines on non-doctors who commit them, I would have no problem with stopping with such a legal regime. I’m with the aforementioned majority of pro-lifers in this respect: Punishment is not and has never been our main goal.

As the president has acknowledged, the country is not ready for a ban on abortion. If somehow one were to be imposed tomorrow, it would indeed tear the country apart. But nobody believes that will happen, and nobody is organizing to achieve it. In the real world, a general ban on abortion would be achieved only after there was a broad social consensus behind it. Or rather, and more to the point: The process of achieving a ban would go hand in hand with the process of achieving that consensus. One indispensable way of building that consensus if for pro-lifers to continue to insist that all the unborn deserve legal protection. They must, in other words, continue to stand for what Frum calls “moral clarity” (and undervalues). Thus the president couples his acknowledgment of political and social reality with a dose of such moral clarity. He does not disavow the goal of a general ban.

Frum says that he is not a pro-lifer, and he is right. But for practical purposes it makes less difference than one might suppose. He wants to get rid of Roe, to ban partial-birth abortion, and to ban human cloning. Pro-lifers would be ecstatic if we could achieve those three things within the next ten years. Frum is therefore an ally of pro-lifers and an opponent of the abortion lobby. That is so even if he sometimes writes things about pro-lifers’ ultimate goals that annoy and vex us.